Mensa Egg-heads to solve African Poverty

Mensa, the society for people who are good at IQ tests, have announced that they have been shining the beam of their collective intellect on some of the world’s most intractable problems, starting with African Poverty.

Entry to Mensa is strictly limited to those who can score in the top two percentiles on Cattell-type tests, and many like to imply that this correlates to useful human intelligence. Until now, Mensa’s most visible contribution to society has been providing puzzles for the newspapers, but after today’s announcement, it is hoped that might change.

Over the past few weeks, members of Mensa’s Global Problems Special Interest Group (GlobProb SIG) have been working together on African Poverty, and believe they have some interesting new insights.

GlobProb SIG leader, Jeff Horn, an IT consultant, summarised the issue as the process of turning ‘want’ into ‘have’. He explained, ‘we think we are able to do this in as few as three steps, changing only one letter at a time, and each time forming a new word. The answer is on page 45 of our findings.’

Another SIG member, IT consultant Justin Higgins, commented, ‘one of the first things we noticed when we sat down together was that I was sitting to the left of Jeff, but two spaces to the right of Gavin, so Tony had to sit between me and Gavin. And that you could find 30 four-sided shapes in the four-by-two lattice of the windows in the meeting room.

Other findings were that ‘African Poverty’ was an anagram of ‘Crave Profanity’ and ‘Frantic Overpay’, and that out of Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan, Chad was the odd one out, for having only one syllable.

Meetings have been held so far on the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 10th and 15th of this month, meaning that the next two meetings will of course be held on the 21st and 28th.

The group intends to release the full text of the findings just as soon as they figure out how to use the fax machine. In the meantime they have invited others of very high intelligence to pay the £45 joining fee which will confirm how smart they are.’